This week saw the International Standards Organisation vote on adopting Office Open XML as a standard for office documents. KDE gained a representative late last year through our legal body KDE e.V. realising that the only way to ensure a fair process was to be part of it. Today our delegate voted yes to adopting the format as an international standard. "We have studied the standard hard and many changes have been made to it," said KDE's Supreme Leader Aaron Seigo "and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source we realised the market should decide the best formats to use, not technical bureaucrats".

The KOffice developers confirmed their support with Cyrille Burger saying, "The level of detail in this standard is very impressive, previous standards we had to deal with were less than half as expansive in their documentation. Working with a standard that makes such good use of previously established standards was also a main reason for the quick implementation in KOffice".

KDE founder Stephan Coolio was unavailable for comment because he was changing nappies.

The day of the innocents is a religious day. It has its origins on the masacre by king Herodes I, who ordered that all babies borned in Judea be killed, hoping that he could get rid of Jesus. The babies are the innocents (which in Spanish also means gullible).

BTW, I read about ooxml in slashdot and didn't believe it, but I couldn't be 100% sure. Reading that KDE embraced ooxml made me realize this wasn't true at all.

Come on! In Spain today isn't fools' day... I coudn't believe whay I was reading... I could only think: "oh god! that donation is a bribe! Don't you realise?". But thanks god I realised today is Aprils Fool...

at first glimpse, i thought that kde is becoming more pragmatic and accepted the obvious, whether we like it or not, open xml is here to stay, no need to say that Microsoft has a near monopoly in office marketplace. i am just wondering how much time will take before we have a working support for open xml in koffice.

Considering that GNOME and OOo already have functional OOXML support, does this mean that the KDE developers are incompetent compared to the GNOME and OOo developers that it would take KDE developers so long to implement?

Somehow I doubt you are correct in your estimation of how long it would take.

I doubt you ever looked at OOo code, or ever actually tried to reuse a non-trivial amount of code that wasn't explicitely designed for that. I don't know about OOXML, but the filters for .xls and older word formats in OOo are known to be of unmaintainable code quality and complexity, not separated from the rest of OOo and often not even documented in English (but in German).

As an independent open standards developer, I find it sad that the focus is totally on OpenDocument and OOOXML.

My own superior standard (it counts 600.000+ pages and was written in a mix of a dozen dying languages, including that one in Mexico) which I submitted to ISO last year was never mentioned, despite obviously being of better quantity and quality.

And to think that I even bribed the stepdaughter of the hairdresser of the cousin of the baker of ISO's chairman.

I certainly appreciate the humor, however given the way things have been going over the last few month, it is really hard to tell whether all of today's news are due to the date on the calendar, or some of them are actually real.

Like all those references to the approval that is supposed to be announced today or tomorrow. One would hope it's all just a sick joke, but knowing how things work in the business-as-usual world, it could all be for real.

In the end it would be a good thing when one could open an OOXML-document in Koffice and could safe a document as an .ooxml-file in Koffice. for the sake of interchange with the poor Windows-users. i mean, today i am exporting everything to .pdf. it is all about interchange. the spice must flow.

...that we would sell out so cheaply, c'mon, it should be at least $12,000!

When you collect, just make sure they don't try palm off some worthless 3rd world currency on you like Zimbabwe dollars or Canadian dollars, and count your fingers afterwards. Say high to Bill and Steve for me.

John.

P.S. Can you put my cut in my Swiss account, you have the number from last time...

Considering the dire quality of the standard, the pattern of national body votes could actually be considered a "corruptibility to US corporate influence" index and should probably be published as such!

APPROVAL - our Lords are in Redmond, consider us the 51st US state!

ABSTAIN - we're honest enough to -almost- say its a pile of shit, but we've read about Hiroshima in the school textbooks

DISAPPROVE - not part of the neoliberal economic order, some degree of sovereignty. At least as far as technical standards go..

Don't you guys realize that today in the US is April Fools? The hint was in the comment ""and following a $10,000 donation from an anonymous North American source...", implying that MS made the contribution.